How the world sees the church

I’ve joked more than once on here that this blog is little more than an exercise in drafting off better blogs, particularly Richard Beck’s, Alan Jacobs’, and Jake Meador’s. Here’s another draft.

Last month Richard wrote a short post reflecting on a famous quote by Lesslie Newbigin. How, Newbigin asks, are people supposed to believe that the first and final truth of all reality and human existence is a victim nailed to a tree, abandoned and left for dead? He answers that “the only hermeneutic of the gospel,” the only interpretation of the good news about Jesus that makes any sense of him, “is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”

Richard then writes:

In a lecture this last semester I shared with my students, “I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’”

I pray for the day when our presence is proclaimed “Good News.” And this isn't just some vague aspiration, it's personal for me. Wherever I show up, I want that to be Good News, unconditionally, no matter who is in the space. And I push my church to have the same impact. This is the work, and really the only work, that should be occupying Christians and the church right now.

There’s a sense in which I couldn’t agree more with this aspiration. The body of Christ should strive to be, to incarnate, to offer the good news in the liberating power of Christ’s Spirit to any and all we encounter—first of all our neighbors and those with whom we interact daily. Yes and amen.

But there’s a reason Richard’s little post has been nagging at me from the back of my brain for the last six weeks. Here’s why.

It isn’t clear to me that the world should see the church and love, welcome, and celebrate her presence. It certainly isn’t clear to me that we should expect or hope that they do. The reason why is fourfold.

First, the only people who genuinely and reasonably see the church as a cause for celebration are believers. Think about it. Why would anyone unconvinced by the gospel be glad that the church exists? That she keeps hanging around? The only people plausibly happy about the church’s existence are Christians—and even many Christians are pretty ambivalent about it. Someone who loves and adores and honors and celebrates the church sounds a lot like someone who believes that Jesus is risen from the dead.

Second, what qualifies as “good news”? If I’m not a believer, I’m liable to find it pretty annoying to be surrounded by weirdos who worship an invisible Someone, follow strict rules about money and sex and power, and believe with all their heart that I should drop everything in my own life and sign up for their beliefs and way of life. Live and let live, you know? You mind your own and I’ll do the same. Yet Christian evangelism is a nonnegotiable, so a nonbelieving neighbor is sure (and right) to be perpetually low-key bored or bothered or both by the fact that the church “has the answer” for his life.

Third, the church is full of sinners. It’s a field hospital for sinsick folk, in the image of Pope Francis. The one thing about which we can be sure, then, is that the church is going to be monumentally, even fantastically dysfunctional. She’s going to cause a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration. That doesn’t mean we excuse in advance our failure to be Christlike to our neighbors. What it does mean is that the church’s appeal to her neighbors is likely going to be a lot less “What a beautiful community of Christ-followers—I love it when they’re around, even though they’re dead wrong about everything important!” and a lot more “What a motley crew of unimpressive failures—I guess they might even tolerate my own humiliating baggage, given what I can see about theirs even from the outside.”

Fourth and finally, Jesus wasn’t exactly “good news” to everyone he met. Now that claim requires some clarification. Jesus was the gospel incarnate. To meet Jesus was to come face to face with God’s good news. And yet if Jesus did anything it was turn off a whole lot of people. He elicited modest approval alongside a metric ton of opposition and murderous hostility. Not everyone saw Jesus coming and said, “Yes! Hooray! I love that guy!” Some did—and they were his followers. Plenty others said the opposite. We know why. Jesus confronted people with the truth: the truth about God and the truth about themselves. He forced on them a decision. And when they declined his invitation to follow him, he let them walk away, sad or sorrowful or resentful or angry or bitter. In short, Jesus was a sign of contradiction.

Pope Saint John Paul II borrowed that phrase, taken from Saint Luke, to describe the church. Like Christ, the church is a sign of contradiction in the world. We shouldn’t expect anyone to be happy about us—up until the point at which they join us. We should expect instead for them to ignore and resent us, at best; to reject and hate us, at worst. Not because of anything wrong with them. But because that’s how they treated Jesus, and he told us to expect the same treatment. They’re only being reasonable. If the gospel isn’t true, the church is a self-contradiction; of all people we should be most pitied. We should be mocked and scorned and excused from respectable society.

We’re only Christians, those of us who are, because we believe the gospel is true. I’m shocked when anyone has anything nice to say about the faith who isn’t already a fellow believer. As I see it, that’s the exception to the rule. So while we should strive to be faithful to Christ’s commission, to embody and enact the good news of his kingdom in this world, I don’t think we should hope or even try to be seen as good news. To be seen as good news amounts to conversion on the part of those doing the seeing. Let’s aim for conversion. Short of that, in terms of how we’re perceived I don’t know that we can expect much from our neighbors who don’t already believe.

A therapeutic church is an atheist church

Two friends of mine, Richard Beck and Jake Meador, have been beating similar drums lately, and it occurred to me today that their drums are in sync.

For some time, Richard has been writing about churches that function as though God does not exist. These churches advocate for forms of life, perspectives on the world, and political activism that often are, and certainly may be, good, but which do not in any way require God. God is an optional extra to the main thing. Needless to say, the children of these churches correctly imbibe the message, and eventually leave behind both church and God. After all, if you can have what the church is selling without either faith in God or, more important, the demands God places on your life, then it is only prudent to keep the baby but throw out the bathwater.

There’s much more to say than this, and Richard is very eloquent on the subject. Summarizing the point: The only reason to be a Christian is if (a) the God of Israel has raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead and (b) this event somehow does for you and for me what we could never do for ourselves, while being the singular answer to our most desperate needs. The only reason to be a Christian, in other words, is the gospel. And if the gospel is rendered redundant by a congregation’s life, worship, and teaching, then said congregation has put itself out of business, whether or not it knows it, whether or not it ever intended to do so. It has become, for all intents and purposes, an atheist church.

As for Jake, he has been writing recently about the therapeutic turn in the American church. A church has become therapeutic if the gospel is reduced, and reducible, to the premises and vocabulary, concepts and recommendations of therapy. A therapeutic church does not speak of sin, judgment, guilt, shame, wrath, hell, repentance, punishment, suffering, crucifixion, deliverance, salvation, Satan, demons, exorcism, and so forth. It takes most or all of these to be in need of translation or elimination: the latter, because they are outmoded or harmful to mental health; the former, because they are applicable to contemporary life but only in psychological, not spiritual, terms. A therapeutic church speaks instead, therefore, of wellness, health, toxicity, self-care, harm, safety, balance, affirmation, holding space, and being well-adjusted.

A church is not therapeutic if it endorses therapy and counseling offered by licensed professional as one among a number of potentially useful tools for people in need; any more than a church in favor of hospitals would be “medicalized” or a church promoting the arts would be “aestheticized.” The question is not whether mental health is real (it is), whether medication is sometimes worth prescribing (it is), or whether therapy can be helpful (it can be). The question is whether mental health is convertible with spiritual health. The question, that is, is whether the work of therapy is synonymous with the work of the gospel; whether the task of the counselor is one and the same as that of the pastor.

Answer: It is not.

This is where Jake’s point intersects with Richard’s. If the gospel is interchangeable with counseling, then people should stop attending church and hire counselors instead. Why not go straight to the source? Why settle for second best? If a minister is merely a so-so therapist with Jesus sprinkled on top, then parishioners can sleep in on Sundays, drop Jesus, and get professional therapy as they please, whenever they wish. I promise you, if what you’re after is twenty-first century quality therapy, neither Holy Scripture nor the Divine Liturgy is the thing for you.

Hence: a therapeutic church is an atheist church. Not because therapy is anti-gospel. Not because therapeutic churches are consciously atheistic. No, a therapeutic church is atheist because it has lost its raison d’être: it preaches a gospel without God. Which is not only an oxymoron but a wholesale inversion of the good news. The gospel is, as St. Paul puts it, “the good news of God.” And if, as he puts it elsewhere, God has not raised Jesus from the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.

A therapeutic church has, in this way, lost its nerve. It simply does not believe what it says it believes, what it is supposed to be preaching. It does not believe that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the best possible news on planet earth, meant for every soul under heaven. It does not believe that the problems of people today, as at all times, have their final answer and ultimate fulfillment in the Word made flesh. Or, to the extent that it does believe this, it is scared to say so, because the folks in the pews do not want to hear that. They want to be affirmed in their identities, in their desires, in their blemishes and failures and foibles. They do not want to be judged by God. They do not want to be told they need saving by God. They do not want to learn that their plight is so dire that the God who created the universe had to die for their sins on a cross. They want to be told: I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re all okay—so long as we accept our imperfections and refuse the siren songs of guilt and shame. They want, in a word, to be heard, to be seen, and to be accepted just as they are.

There is a reason people are going to churches looking for that, why churches are increasingly offering it to them. It’s near to the gospel. But the overlap is incomplete. God is not a therapist, and his principal goal in Christ is not to ensure a high degree of mental health in the context of a larger successful venture in upper-middle class professional/family life. God, rather, is in the business of holiness. And as Stanley Hauerwas has observed, vanishingly few of the saints would qualify as “well-adjusted.” The risen Lord without warning struck Paul blind and subsequently informed Ananias, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). Has anyone read a Pauline epistle and thought, Now this is a picture of stable mental health? The flame of holiness knows no bounds; it leaves burns and scars painful to the touch; it scorches the mind no less than the body:

And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:7-10)

I cannot say whether the author of these words was entirely well. But he was an apostle, and then a martyr, and now a saint. To say the same thing another way, his life was and remains unintelligible if the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a fiction. No God, no Paul. The same should be said (should be sayable) of every church and every Christian in the world—at least by aspiration, at least in terms of what they say about themselves, whatever the extent to which they succeed or fail to meet the goal.

The more, however, a congregation becomes therapeutic, in its language, its liturgy, its morals, its common life, the more God recedes from the picture. God becomes secondary, then tertiary, then ornamental, then metaphorical, then finally superfluous. The old-timers keep God on mostly out of muscle memory, but the younger generations know the score. They don’t quit church and stop believing in God because of a lack of catechesis, as if they weren’t listening on Sundays. They were listening all right. The catechesis didn’t fail; it worked, only too well. The twenty- and thirty-somethings were preached right out of the gospel—albeit with the best of intentions and a smile on every minister and usher’s face. They smiled right back, and headed for the exit sign.

Double literacy loss

Last week I was asked by a graduate student the following question: In today’s culture, what is the biggest challenge for Christians in attempting to steward and share the scriptures with the next generation—whether within the church or without?

This was a very helpful question to be forced to face head on. I’m not especially good at apologetics, either in practice or at the level of theory. But a concise answer occurred to me that I’ve been reflecting on since I gave it.

The biggest challenge, it seems to me, is a sort of double loss of literacy.

First is biblical literacy. For centuries this has been the ambient culture of Western societies, including the United States. Whether or not this or that individual was a Christian, the default setting around him or her was inflected by the Bible: its stories, its characters, its plots, its very verbiage. Read public speeches from the nineteenth century. They are positively studded with allusions to the Bible. A Bible nerd from 2022 wouldn’t catch them all. But a barely literate teenager in 1822 might have. That’s what “biblical literacy” means. Even a generation ago at my own institution, students came in with impressive knowledge of the Bible. Today, not so much—even from students who are committed Christians, having attended church all their lives.

But that’s not the only challenge, or rather, the only loss of literacy.

The second is literal literacy. People under 25 today, including those who earn high school and college and even graduate degrees, including those who get A’s and B’s and generally “succeed” at school, do not read. That is to say, they are not readers. For most of them, perhaps nearly all of them, sitting still with a book for 30 minutes, much less two or three hours, is either wishful thinking or a nightmare. One gets itchy after five minutes at most. Check for mentions, check for texts, check for DMs, refresh the feed, refresh the inbox, send a Snap, send a Polo, stream a video, play a game—the options are endless. This presumes one is already sitting down, book in hand, ready and even eager to read. That’s too much. Nine times out of ten down time is the same as it always is, every evening and late into the night: watching a show on a streaming service and/or YouTube, assuming all the social media and communication with friends are turned off (which they aren’t).

None of this is meant as criticism. Don’t (yet) imagine me as an old man waving my cane at the youngsters to get off my lawn. My register here is not pejorative. It’s purely descriptive. Teenagers and twentysomethings today, by and large, are not readers. By which I mean, they are not readers of books. They read endlessly, as a matter of fact, but their reading takes place in 5-15 second chunks of time on a glowing device, before the next image or swipe or alert restarts the clock. Minds trained on this from a young age simply lack the stamina, not to mention the desire, to read for pleasure for sustained stretches of time.

In a prior age of mass education and biblical literacy, one largely devoid of screens, literal literacy was crucial for apologetics as well as evangelism and discipleship, because it meant that the necessary conditions for coming to have a direct experience of and relationship with the Bible were in place. It meant too that, often if not always, a primary entry point for reaching someone with the gospel was studying the Bible with them. For their own preexisting habits, as well as their inherited mental atmosphere, conduced to support the reception of Bible reading in their daily lives. Getting to know the God of Christian faith and reading the sacred book of Christian faith were convertible; to do one was to do the other.

No longer. And it seems to me a profound error—the older generation “always fighting the last war,” as the saying goes—to assume that this once apt or successful strategy is a fitting approach moving forward. Even if you were to convince a 17-year old curious about Jesus that the Bible is the way to learn about Jesus, why assume that she will now do something she never otherwise does, namely spend hours in deliberate demanding literary study, in order to keep learning about him on her own? That’s a bad bet. Assume rather that she likes the idea of doing so but will never quite find the time to get around to it.

What does this mean for evangelism and discipleship today? For reaching the next generation with the riches and truths of Holy Scripture?

An answer to the second question will have to wait for another day. Partly I simply don’t know; partly a proper answer is too big for this blog post, perhaps for any such post.

As for evangelism and discipleship: What it means, negatively, is that the Bible will not, for most young people, be the principal means thereof. Which means, positively, that something else will be. Not that the Bible will be uninvolved. Only that it won’t (usually) be the point of entry, and it won’t (directly) play the starring role.

What will? So far as I can tell, the answer is liturgy, friendship, witness, and service. That is to say, the sacramental life of tight-knit Christian community in mutual support and external care. The Bible will and must saturate such a life, from top to bottom and beginning to end. Such a life will be dead on arrival if the testimony of the apostles and prophets does not animate it from within and at all times.

Nevertheless this role is different than the role the Bible has had in churches, especially “low” Protestant churches, these last two or three centuries. It will take some getting used to. It’s time we got started, though. The double loss of literacy is a fait accompli. It’s a done deal and already in the rear view mirror. The only question is whether we respond, and how. We can mourn and bemoan the loss, recalling the good old days. Or we can get to work.

I say let’s get to work.

Perennial Lewis

As I’ve written about previously, I’ve spent the last 10-12 months rereading the major works of C. S. Lewis by listening to them on audio. That has meant nearly 20 books, split evenly between fiction and nonfiction. I’m on my last one now (I finished my romp through Chesterton earlier this month), which means 2022 will be wide open for my post-podcast listening habits.

In any case, a few final reflections on Lewis. In particular, on Lewis the apologist and why (a) there has not been a genuine successor to his genius or his stature and (b) why he remains so popular as we approach the 60th anniversary of his death.

1. The first answer is simple: they don’t make ’em like they used to. Lewis describes himself as a converted pagan among apostate puritans, and that’s the right way to read him. Even if he weren’t a first-rate stylist and multifaceted writer (novels, children’s stories, science fiction, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, philosophy, ethics, apologetics), his sheer learning sets him apart. Nor did he gain that learning as part of a strategy for something called “outreach” or intellectual evangelism. He came to the faith ready-made, the product of an extraordinary mind molded by an extraordinary education. I wonder sometimes whether there’s even one Anglophone Christian scholar today under 45 years old who does not spend his or her time regularly on the internet, social media, and/or streaming television. The sheer time given to such trifles (I’m looking at myself here) means ipso facto that one could not hope to reach one-tenth of Lewis’s erudition.

2. The next answer is obvious: the disciples of Lewis are not like Lewis, nor do they aspire to be. They do not come from where he came from; they do not share his education; their overlap with his literary and intellectual affections is minimal. Lewis came to Christ by way of myth and romance, epic poetry and the drama of pagan pleasures. These are foreign to Lewis’s foremost admirers, above all American evangelicals. This is a man who was (until the end) a bachelor who loved rich beer, good tobacco, other men, and talk of dragons. Preferably with a shared knowledge of half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. Whereas those who love Lewis most love him for his side hobby (which, granted, we may assume was his calling from God): putting the complexities of the faith into plain language for common people, against powerful cultural trends. None of them, in other words, is going to have a chance of becoming him.

3. But that’s a negative way of putting the matter. So let me say this. Going back over books I first read twenty years ago, now on the far side of a more or less continuous theological education in college and graduate school, I see now more clearly than ever Lewis’s brilliance. He really was a one of one. As I listen to his most popular—by which I mean not his most successful or beloved but his most vulgar or common—speeches and writings, I am consistently struck by how little has changed (at least, between postwar England and contemporary America), but more so by how excellent his answers are to the questions of the time. By and large they need not, because they cannot, be improved upon. There is no Lewis 2.0 because eight times out of ten, if an honest skeptic asks you a question, you should just point him to the essay or book that Lewis already wrote. If it ain’t broke, etc.

4. There are subjects that Lewis did not address or articulate as well as he did others; these remain for others to elaborate or expand upon. He is not, it seems to me, especially trustworthy on politics. His ecclesiology is thin. Though he can be quite good on sex and gender, at other times he is bad, and occasionally he is plain weird. In his time he was on the threshold—knowingly—of a truly post-Christian society. It was already present in the people, but the trappings remained in law, education, and culture. No longer. What does it mean to take up the baton from him? That is, to evangelize a re-paganized West at once post-Christian and anti-Christian yet also somehow formally and thus morally and spiritually Christian (without knowing or acknowledging it)?

That, so far as I can tell, is the question to ask. Not least because it’s the question he’d be asking. I don’t have hope that there will be another like him anytime soon. But God has done stranger things. At any rate, we can give God thanks for doing the altogether strange thing of converting Lewis to Christ. Lord knows Lewis is on the short list of reasons why I am a believer. How many others can say the same?